Broken open

Monday, December 07, 2009

Too fast, too furious

My mother comes in to help me move from ICU to neurosurgery. It's a long way in my bed through corridors, elevators and strange corners of the hospital.

At neurosurgery, there is complete chaos. There is only one nurse and she has never treated anyone in a halo before! She does not know what to do with my lung drain. She looks anxious and I am very afraid.

I want to go back to the ICU, to Gilbert, to that cocoon where I know I would survive.

The nurse instructs me to lie back and then my pins get loose. I feel excruciating pain and I fall back to the bed. My pins are loose and it hurts so much I beg for morphine. But I am off the morphine. There is no surgeon to tighten the pins. There is only Contramal and sister Dafalgan and the longest night in my life.

"Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself." I read that night